Brian Mackey: All I want for Christmas is a good book

Friday

Nov 28, 2008 at 12:01 AMNov 28, 2008 at 6:45 AM

Dickens’ “Christmas Books” have led my annual best-of-intentions Christmas reading list for nearly a decade now. But at the risk of disappointing high school English teachers, I’m sorry to say I’ve never made it much beyond the first few pages.

Charles Dickens begins “A Christmas Carol” with a disquisition on the metaphor “dead as a door nail.” I’ve heard it said that Dickens was paid by the word, and the first three paragraphs of his classic Christmas story seem evidence enough:

“Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed for it. And Scrooge’s name was good upon ‘Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to.

“Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

“Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country’s done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.”

Dickens’ “Christmas Books” have led my annual best-of-intentions Christmas reading list for nearly a decade now. But at the risk of disappointing high school English teachers, I’m sorry to say I’ve never made it much beyond the first few pages.

But every year brings a new chance to tackle the list, so I went around the house gathering my Christmas books into a pile. (The book I’m currently reading, Hunter S. Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72,” will have to wait until after the holidays. Or 2012.) I’ve never made it through the entire stack, but not everything is as onerous as Dickens.

The best of the lot comes from David Sedaris, whose “Holidays on Ice” collects some of his earliest — and funniest — stories. It’s out in a new hardcover edition this year, with six additional stories.

The book begins with one of Sedaris’ best-known works, “SantaLand Diaries,” about his stint as a Macy’s elf. But I’m partial to some of the lesser-known stories, like “Front Row Center With Thaddeus Bristol.”

It’s a drama critic’s first-person essay assessing the Christmas plays at his local elementary schools.

“The problem with all of these shows stems partially from their maddening eagerness to please. With smiles stretched tight as bungee cords, these hopeless amateurs pranced and gamboled across our local stages, hiding behind their youth and begging, practically demanding, we forgive their egregious mistakes,” Sedaris writes as Bristol. “While billing themselves as holiday entertainment, none of these productions came close to capturing the spirit of Christmas. This glaring irony seemed to escape the throngs of ticketholders, who ate these undercooked turkeys right down to the bone.”

John Grisham’s “Skipping Christmas” also makes the list, and can be read in a night or two — I’d recommend it after a long day of shopping, when its title strikes you as a decent idea.

Stories of war and Christmas also figure into my reading list. That began a few years ago when I read William Wharton’s “A Midnight Clear.” It’s a riveting novel about a group of brainy American soldiers tapped for a Christmas patrol on the German front, 1944.

Also worthwhile is the first of Stanley Weintraub’s Christmas-war histories, “Silent Night: The Story of the World War I Christmas Truce.” It can be dense with details, but the story of a bottom-up truce in the earliest days of the Great War makes one wonder how history might have turned out differently had decisions been left to the front-line soldiers.

All that remains, then — and at the risk of mixing holiday metaphors — is the elusive Holy Grail of my Christmas reading list: “Christmas at the New Yorker.”

It’s filled with great stories, like John Cheever’s “Christmas is a Sad Season for the Poor.” But like too many copies of the New Yorker stacked in my office, it has remained largely the province of good intentions.

With holiday movies and albums added into the mix, not to mention the many live performances, the prospect of holiday arts and entertainment consumption can be daunting. But I’m committed, and this year’s plan is to get through the New Yorker book. Maybe even Dickens.

Brian Mackey can be reached at brian.mackey@sj-r.com.

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